Web 3.0 Indexing: PlaceID and PeopleID
I wrote last week, that we need to include Place in the Web 3.0 formula, and this week Cal McElroy introduced the concept of PlaceID, a unique identifier which enables all content on the web to be indexed by Place.
As I was thinking through this, and exchanging emails will Cal, we also felt that a similar indexing scheme is necessary for People search.
Ofcourse, People search has become a bit of an industry with search engines like Spock. So let’s start there.
Do a search on Philip Roth. You’ll see, that the first entry and the tenth entry, both refer to a 74 year old writer in New York. Are these two the same person? How can you know?
The answer is, you can only know, if a unique PeopleID existed, that can index the web by people.
Yes, the exact same concept as what Cal has been talking about in terms of indexing the web by Place.
Yes, we need both types of indexing.
If, for example, there are fifteen Philip Roth’s on LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and Plaxo, how do we establish the intersections? Perhaps by email addresses, which Plaxo attempts. But LinkedIn and others are not supposed to give out our email ids, so how do you reconcile?
No, we need a unique PeopleID as well.
As far as I can tell, anyway!
[...] While we are on the topic of PlaceID and PeopleID, I should tell you about my recent visit with Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub, and VP of Marketing John McCrea. Ben Golub was, prior to Plaxo, the CMO of Verisign. Ben’s first Silicon Valley job was cutting apricots in an orchard which was paved over to build the Apple Computer headquarters. [...]
Hi Sramana,
In large corporations, especially those that serve millions of geographically dispersed consumers… this is a huge problem. The Data Warehousing Institute published a study in 2002 that indicated US businesses waste over US$ 611 B per year in resources, due to bad name and address data.
At the core of this issue is ambiguity. Is the customer J. Smith, John Smith, John J. Smith, or John Jacob Jingleheimber Schmidt. Like addresses, there are no standards and lots of data entry errors, when names are entered into computer systems.
The other half of the problem is that we can’t rely on address to resolve the name ambiguity because 25 - 30% of people and businesses move every year. Large enterprises, like Telcom, Banks and Media companies are embracing unique CustomerIDs and PlaceIDs in their business systems in an attempt to eliminate this ambiguity and create a consolidated view of a customer or household.
Group 1 has been working on this name and address hygiene and standardization problem for years, making millions of dollars for its shareholders, and achieving a nice exit with the US$ 321 acquisition by Pitney Bowes in 2004.
However, the ability to link a world of information about a person, using a unique PeopleID in the public web opens the door to some major privacy issues.
Businesses generally want to get “found” and welcome a way to have all public information about their “places of business” indexed and searchable in the web… thus PlaceID has a value proposition and monetization potential.
However, media visibility for People, whether a nasty article about you in the Wall Street Journal, a friendly blog, or a profile on Facebook is a sensitive thing. With any media, we always face the prospect of accepting the good coverage with the bad.
I suspect most people, who don’t like being fingerprinted, would balk at having the equivalent of an SIN/SSN number used for purposes of public identification, or data integration.
My2c
Cal,
All places are not businesses. Privacy issues exist for both PlaceID and PeopleID, and just as we have listed vs. unlisted numbers in the telephone directory today, it is important to let consumers decide to what extent they want to be found both from an identity and an address point of view.
However, people who are making their business to make information searchable, have precisely the same incentive to let people be searchable as place.
The incentive and the momentum is not because people / places want to be found, but it is because people / businesses want to find them.